“Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour” is currently shaking up the entire film industry and has overtaken numerous blockbusters this year in cinema with an incredible worldwide box office of approximately $125 million during its opening weekend. It is not only exciting that a music documentary can generate so much attention on the big screen, but that Taylor Swift brought the film to the cinemas almost on his own initiative.
Also a film buff and ‘Oppenheimer’ director Christopher Nolan has nothing but admiration for it and spoke on one about the phenomenon ‘The Eras Tour’ in international cinemas: “Taylor Swift shows it to the studios, because her concert film is not distributed via the studios, but directly via cinema operator AMC and generates a lot of money. And that’s the point, because this format, this way of seeing things and sharing stories, is incredibly valuable. And if the studios don’t want to do it, someone else will. That’s just the truth.”
Film studios like Warner, Disney and Universal or streaming services like Netflix or Amazon are often behind blockbusters of this magnitude. Swift had also collaborated with streamers on her previous concert films. Her documentary “Reputation Stadium Tour” and “Miss Americana” were released on Netflix, while her “Folklore: The Long Pond Studio Sessions” were released on Disney+. However, after Swift’s “Eras” concert tour broke records this year and left many fans without concert tickets, Swift apparently decided to release her new film in a slightly different way.
Taylor Swift fights for her rights – a role model for film culture?
Taylor Swift is solely behind the production of ‘The Eras Tour’ and signed a direct deal with the American cinema chain AMC, without the intervention of major studios or distributors. Although negotiations took place with larger studios, the poor conditions for Swift are said to have caused her to turn away from the household names.
This move doesn’t actually come as a surprise to Swifties, because if there’s one thing we’ve learned about Taylor Swift in recent years, it’s that that she is reluctant to share the rights to her creative work. She is currently in the process of re-recording all of her albums made under her old label’s contract so that she can finally call all of her music her own. Fans are now eagerly awaiting her 2014 hit album “1989” as “Taylor’s Version” at the end of October this year.
Christopher Nolan is also a regular champion of cinema
Through the direct contract with AMC, Swift was able to lock in tickets for ‘The Eras Tour’ at a self-determined price of 19.89 euros or US dollars for adults and 13.13 euros or US dollars for children. A whopping 57% of the proceeds go straight back to Swift and her production company, while a significant percentage of that would normally go to a studio – which doesn’t exist here.
It’s no surprise that filmmaker Christopher Nolan takes his hat off to this. How the director himself announced his collaboration with Warner Bros. during the corona pandemic. that increasingly wanted to expand major releases to the streamer HBO Max. His blockbuster “Oppenheimer” was eventually distributed by Universal and had a successful worldwide theatrical release. So it’s no surprise that Nolan is also taking a stand for Taylor Swift’s corporate culture in cinema. We can’t wait to see who in the industry will learn a lesson from the pop singer in the future.